Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem Aug. 1, 2024

A good Thursday morning to you all! August is here, and it’s one of the best months of the year for racing. Here in Virginia we have the Arlington Million (G1) coming up next week (Aug. 10), so I’ll give you my thoughts on that next week. For today’s column, though, I wanted to go a ways off the grid into a bit of a strange topic, but one that I find very fascinating. Racing dreams. In my case, announcing dreams. 

Over the years, I’ve had slight variations of the same dream many, many times. I’ve talked to other race callers who have shared with me that they too have had repetitive dreams about announcing. The one that seems to be shared amongst a lot of my colleagues is that in their dreams, they can’t find the booth. They wander all throughout the racetrack and press box, but no matter what they do or where they turn, they can’t find the booth. 

My recurring dream is that I’m told I have to call a race, but I have no program. For some very strange reason this dream has often taken place at Turf Paradise. 

Now I’ve been to Turf Paradise and even applied for the job there once, on one of its many openings. But several times in my dreams, I was there as a fan, just sitting in the turf club and eating lunch, when all of a sudden someone in management would hand me a headset and microphone along with binoculars.

Each time I’d look up, and the horses were walking towards the starting gate, and I had no clue who they were. No program, no names, nothing. Usually they’d start loading in and I’d start talking “here comes the one,” but then I’d wake up early in the race because I was panicking. 

I’m fascinated by our dreams and trying to analyze why we think what we do when we’re asleep. What’s always been strange to me about my dreams is they’re rarely about people or places that are central to my life. It’s always someone random from high school that shows up, or a track I don’t think about much like Turf Paradise. 

Fast forward to this week, and I had another announcing dream. There were some similarities to the previous ones, as again I had no program and didn’t know the names of the horses. But this time I was at Mountaineer Racetrack and the “booth” was in the infield. It was a huge indoor facility, more so than a booth, and on the wall were two headsets, neither with cords attached to them. I wandered around looking for the headset that worked and my current boss at Colonial Downs, Frank, was in this booth and told me where to stand. 

The horses left the gate and I’d never called from the infield of a racetrack. Immediately I noticed that two horses had orange silks and orange saddle towels. There were two number 7 horses! As the horses went into the first turn the view was obstructed by several huge trees. So I walked over to the center of the room, and standing there was WWE wrestler Brock Lesnar, who also had an announcing headset on. I stood right next to him, shoulder to shoulder, as we both called the same race. Only he had a program, so he was doing better than me. 

Again I woke up before the race was over. My theory is that I do worry a lot about not knowing the horses’ names. I’ve been in a lot of booths with a lot of race callers, and some can have the field memorized pretty quickly. Some barely do it at all and can go back and forth between the race and their program. I’ve always memorized the field forward and back for each race several times before the race kicks off. So I’m guessing that the dream is just my fear of not knowing the names playing itself out in my head.  

Would be curious to hear from you guys if you’ve had recurring racing dreams?